For decades, the academic world has disregarded the intervening period spent in Chateau Noir as simply a passing, inconsequential period that had little bearing on the artist’s enduring style. The replacement theories seem like square pegs in round holes with time intervals that don’t overlap and issues of viability. This theory, however, seems to satisfy two issues surrounding Cézanne - the period and his ego. Unlike the geology or the illness theories, the Chateau Noir stay dates from the 1899-1901 period, just before the late period paintings began appearing in 1902. Another interesting implication develops when we look at this new style in conjunction with two other factors: the sheer number of paintings from 1902-1906 and the artist’s ego. In the seventeen years from 1885-1902, Cézanne painted twenty-two versions of Mount Saint-Victoire. In the four years from 1902-1906, he painted no less than thirty-nine versions of the mountain (Venturi). This phenomenon is due in part to the very nature of Cézanne’s new style. If he concentrated on only a small aspect of the mountain each time he formed a color block, that accentuated form erased many other parts of the mountain. He would need an innumerable amount of paintings to successfully capture each form’s color on Mount Saint-Victoire’s face. If we combine that condition with Cézanne’s pride in himself and his method, the result is a painter who, believing so heartily in his style, will never quit until he is successful. What began as a casual love of the mountain as a symbol of Provence, evolved into a full-fledged obsession.